Monday 13 July 2009 06.42 EDT
First published on Monday 13 July 2009 06.42 EDT

So far as I can determine, "the special relationship" – a phrase you will almost never hear in the US – was first popularised by Winston Churchill during, and after, the second world war.

No surprise there: as the child of an Anglo-American marriage, Churchill was uniquely alert to the nuances of transatlantic relations. But – a larger question – when was it that the great British monologue, so dominant throughout the Victorian age, yielded to the Anglo-American dialogue I wrote about yesterday?

You might imagine that this occurred towards the end of the 19th century, when Americans began making regular visits to London on the transatlantic liners of the day, but actually it seems to have happened later. For this, as it happens, we have some very good evidence in an essay by Cyril Connolly, possibly the Observer's greatest literary contributor.

In 1949, Connolly wrote a fascinating essay, On Englishmen Who Write American. He opened with an intriguing conceit: "Imagine trying to deliver a lecture in 1918 on the influence of American literature on Kipling, Hardy, Shaw, Yeats, Conrad, Bennett, Galsworthy, or George Moore. It would be a very short lecture."

Then, Connolly continues, imagine the same lecture in 1928 ("it would be a very much longer lecture"), and running forward into the 1940s where, citing Greene, Waugh, Auden and Spender as chief examples, he adds, "the difficulty now would be to name any major English writers who were not deeply influenced by America".

In other words, the first world war marks the decisive turning point. After the slaughter in France, and the Versailles peace treaty of 1919, "our British climate was out of date, our Roman gravitas was not enough for a world which was becoming obsessed with the problem of despair".

From that point forward, the Anglo-American dialogue continued and developed across all the arts, not just literature. In some instances - Martin Amis's relationship with Saul Bellow, for example - this "dialogue" could sometimes become extraordinarily intense. A further decisive shift in the Anglo-American literary relationship occurred in the 1980s, the last decade of the cold war. The Anglo-American hegemony had gone global; it was no longer confined to the US or the UK, though its roots were obviously still in the Britain of Dickens and Shakespeare, and the America of Whitman and Twain.

That was then. Global culture has its own momentum. Now I want to suggest that from roughly 2000 to 2009 something else has begun to take place: namely, that this tradition has begun to declare independence from its imperial and colonial past. For many cultures, in the Caribbean, in India and the far east, and in much of Africa, this tradition has acquired a life that gives English and American language and literature a supra-national, global life that separates it from the past.